Abstract
Potato is the world's most important vegetable crop, with nearly 400 million tons produced worldwide every year, lending to stability in food supply and socioeconomic impact. In general, potato is an intensively managed crop, requiring irrigation, fertilization, and frequent pesticide applications in order to obtain the highest yields possible. Important traits are easy to find in wild relatives of potato, but their introduction using traditional breeding can take 15–20 years. This is due to sexual incompatibility between some wild and cultivated species, a desire to remove undesirable wild species traits from adapted germplasm, and difficulty in identifying broadly applicable molecular markers. Fortunately, potato is amenable to propagation via tissue culture and it is relatively easy to introduce new traits using currently available biotech transformation techniques. For these reasons, potato is arguably the crop that can benefit most by modern biotechnology. The benefits of biotech potato, such as limited gene flow to conventionally grown crops and weedy relatives, the opportunity for significant productivity and nutritional quality gains, and reductions in production cost and environmental impact, have the potential to influence the marketability of newly developed varieties. In this review we will discuss current and past efforts to develop biotech potato varieties, traits that could be impacted, and the potential effects that biotech potato could have on the industry.
Highlights
Since the introduction of the first genetically modified (GM)/ biotech crop plants in the mid-1990s, the agriculture industry has seen a steady increase in the acreage of those crops planted and harvested worldwide each year
The costs associated with the development of a new biotech crop variety make it difficult for research scientists to carry out the entire process without industry and market support (Miller and Bradford 2010)
The purpose of this review is to provide readers with an overview of biotech potato including its history, past and potential impact on the industry, targeted traits, consumer perception, and biotech crop safety
Summary
Since the introduction of the first genetically modified (GM)/ biotech crop plants in the mid-1990s, the agriculture industry has seen a steady increase in the acreage of those crops planted and harvested worldwide each year. Potato breeding efforts have historically focused on yield, fresh market and processing quality, and storability as well as disease resistance Genetic variation for these traits in commercial cultivars is low, but related wild species contain many traits not found in cultivars and represent an especially rich source of disease resistance and tuber quality genes (Hanneman 1989; Jansky 2000). This is contrasted with traditional transgenic plants that use DNA derived from bacteria, viruses, or other organisms. The use of biotechnology will provide a much-needed avenue for the introduction of unique traits present in wild potato relatives, which would typically be difficult or impossible to introduce into cultivated potato using traditional methods
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